Thursday, 24 November 2016

Bowie: More than one, but
less than many. The beginning of a Cracked Actor-Network Theory

David Bowie once claimed
that: “But anything that Western culture has to offer – I’ve put myself through
it.” What happens, then, if we take Bowie at his word? What if the
cracked-actor can be used as a mechanism to consider a general account of the
cultural logic of late capitalism?

In Aircraft Stories,
John Law, the Sociologist and pioneer of Actor-Network Theory gives an account
of the development of a British military aircraft, the TSR2. However, this is
not a mere account of military technology. Instead, Law argues, the aircraft is
used to frame a more general description of the social system of the
“Euro-American world” in the 2nd half of the 20thCentury.
His project is to use the TSR2 to think: “about modernism and its child,
postmodernism – and about how we might think past the limits that these set to
our ways of thinking.”

Law describes his method of
Actor-Network Theory in the following terms:

“Actor-network theory
is a disparate family of material-semiotic tools, sensibilities and methods of
analysis that treat everything in the social and natural worlds as a
continuously generated effect of the webs of relations within which they are located.
It assumes that nothing has reality or form outside the enactment of those
relations. Its studies explore and characterise the webs and the practices that
carry them. Like other material-semiotic approaches, the actor-network approach
thus describes the enactment of materially and discursively heterogeneous
relations that produce and reshuffle all kinds of actors including objects,
subjects, human beings, machines, animals, ‘nature’, ideas, organisations,
inequalities, scale and sizes, and geographical arrangements.”

Conceived in these terms,
the TSR2 is an object that can be understood as positioned within a complex set
of networks and relations. It is “a fractionally coherent subject or object is
one that balances between plurality and singularity. It is more than
one, but less than many.”

The proposal, then, is to
consider David Bowie in similar terms; that is, as similarly fractionally
coherent and “more than one, but less than many.” In doing so an account
of the social systems of late capitalism might emerge as the medium and context
within which the identity of David Bowie was framed and constituted.

Tuesday, 8 March 2016

In 1971
David Bowie was still a young man of 24 when he invented Ziggy Stardust the
messianic alien rock star who came to earth. By the end of the album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the
Spiders from Mars, Ziggy is dead in a ‘Rock and Roll Suicide’, having been
torn apart by, apparently, his appetites and fans. As we know, Bowie himself
was perpetually in a moment being lived twice – Bowie being the alter-ego of the
more prosaically named David Jones. A mere 45 years later Bowie was, like
Ziggy, also gone; his death having been similarly, meticulously choreographed
in the beautiful, unprecedented and almost unbearable work of art of the album Blackstar and its accompanying videos.

The Ziggy
album opens with the song ‘5 Years’. As is so often the case with the best pop music it is reflection on
human finitude amidst the fleeting contingencies of the world. And the
potential for love and art (and, surely in pop we can be allowed to think of
them as being the same thing) to sweetly resist the disorder and collapse that
we must all, inevitably, submit to.

The story
of the song narrated by the singing protagonist begins with him:

“Pushing through the market square, so many
mothers sighing
News had just come over, we had five years left to cry in
News guy wept and told us, earth was really dying
Cried so much his face was wet, then I knew he was not lying.”

It
appears that humans and their world are facing extinction.

In the
list that follows you can hear our character collecting up the appearances of the
furniture of a world that is about to no longer exist. As he walks around the
dying environment he becomes a kind of pop phenomenologist grasping at the
thick textures of phenomena. He’s gathering up some of those things that will,
all too soon, be gone for ever:

“I heard telephones, opera house, favourite
melodies,
I saw boys, toys, electric irons and tvs.
My brain hurt like a warehouse it had no room to spare,
I had to cram so many things to store everything in there.”

The key
moment of the song comes with the following line:

“I think I saw you in an ice-cream parlour,
drinking milk shakes cold and long.

Smiling and waving and looking so fine,
don’t think you knew you were in this song.”

At this
moment there comes a beautiful merging of worlds. It’s signalled by Bowie
singing in a higher register. The worlds of our protagonist’s memory and the
song we listen to become indistinguishable. The address “don’t think you knew
you were in this song” seems to be directed within the song, to the milkshake
drinker whilst also, simultaneously, pointing outwards to the listener. We’re
in the song too. At this moment, the moment of the planet’s doom becomes a moment
to be lived twice over. It is lived in the memory of the protagonist; and lived
again in the song.

The song becomes a stand-in for all works of art which are
like little warehouses crammed full of those things that are about to be lost;
those things that, in 5 years will be gone.

There’s
the rub. 5 years. That all any of us have; more or less; give or take the odd
year here and there. In a few mere years we will all be gone. And in the face of this finitude the only thing that offers any salvation is beauty.

Tuesday, 24 November 2015

The movements of
the stars have become clearer; but to the mass of the people the movements of
their masters are still incalculable.

Bertolt Brecht, The
Life of Galileo

Spaceship
Earth is not Static

Stand
up and look down at your feet.

I’m
going to assume that you’re not travelling, which is
increasingly likely these days. But in any event it doesn’t change the main point.
The ground beneath your feet is not moving; at least not in relation to your
body. The sky above, outside, is not so fixed.
The sun and moon and all that other stuff up there travel above us on
their daily and annual and other cycles within the cosmic system. But the
ground is different. It’s a fixed base. This fixity is important both literally
as it’s where your feet are planted, and metaphorically too, as it’s a
foundation for our experience. Experience begins with and on the earth.

Yet
squaring this experience with what we know creates something of a snag. It’s
not what’s happening in reality. Spaceship Earth is not static. Scientific
observation tells us that the motionless planet of experience is actually hurtling
through space; spinning not only around its axis but also around the sun. Freud
recognised the trauma that this scientific knowledge potentially causes and
spoke about the two outrages to humanity that modern science provided; a third
being presented by his own psychoanalysis:

“Humanity, in the
course of time, has had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages
against its naive self-love. The first was when humanity discovered that our
earth was not the center of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a
world-system hardly conceivable in its magnitude. This is associated in our
minds with the name “Copernicus,” although Alexandrian science had taught much
the same thing. The second occurred when biological research robbed man of his
apparent superiority under special creation, and rebuked him with his descent from
the animal kingdom, and his ineradicable animal nature. This re-valuation,
under the influence of Charles Darwin, Wallace and their predecessors, was not
accomplished without the most violent opposition of their contemporaries. But
the third and most irritating insult is flung at the human mania of greatness
by present-day psychological research, which wants to prove to the “I” that it
is not even master in its own home, but is dependent upon the most scanty
information concerning all that goes on unconsciously in its psychic life.”

Crucially,
the scientific Copernican Revolution of modernity not only involves the
astronomical modelling of the cosmos but also a shift in world-view. What
emerges is a theoretical awareness, developed also by Galileo and Descartes,
that fundamental features of nature can be described as a system; mathematically. Hence the
world, by virtue of its capacity to be modelled mathematically, is understood to
be separate from human consciousness and is independent of thought.

Copernican
Revolutions

Actually,
the so-called Copernican Revolution has two meanings. There is its literal
sense in the emergence of a modern, scientific and heliocentric world view. And
there is a metaphorical use in philosophy. In this second sense it is often
used to name the so-called transcendental turn taken by philosophy from
ImmanuelKant in the late 18th
century onwards and which the philosopher Quentin Meillassoux has recently
named Correlationism. This Correlationism (of which Meillassoux is critical) claims that any thought
about the world independent of that
thought is impossible. That is, we can never know what the world is like in-itself. This philosophical use of the
Copernican revolution as a metaphor originated from a comment in the second
preface to The Critique of Pure Reason
(1787) where Kant proposes to do for metaphysics what Copernicus had done for
cosmology, namely effect a sudden revolution leading to a paradigm shift in
thought itself. In On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543) Copernicus proposed a
heliocentric system that reversed the commonly accepted Ptolemaic geocentric
model of the universe. Kant states that whereas previously it had been assumed
that knowledge conforms to its objects he will develop a metaphysics that
begins from the supposition that objects conform to knowledge. From this
emerges the transcendental turn that modifies metaphysical questions directed
toward things in-themselves, which is claimed to be impossible, into questions
of how knowledge of the world is possible.

However,
this is the violent contradiction that leads to these ‘outrages’ of modernity.
So, whilst science allows for the possibility of a mind independent of reality,
philosophy insists that thought about that reality in-itself is impossible. The
metaphor itself is paradoxical as it positions humans at the centre of their
philosophical systems yet at the edge of their scientific ones.

And
yet, to not accept this and to deny scientific revolutions positions one as a
crank, crackpot or conspiracy theorist. The snag is going to be, then, how to reconcile those two domains: knowledge and experience. And there, perhaps, we have a model of what work the artwork can do.[From an essay on Niamh McCann's work]

In this public exchange, art historiansFrancis Halsall(National College of Art and Design, Dublin),Kris Cohen (Reed College) andJohanna Gosse(Columbia University) will discuss the art world in terms of systems. They take as their starting point three recent books on the state of the contemporary art world: Pamela Lee’s Forgetting the Art World (2012), David Joselit’s After Art (2012), and Lane Relyea’s Your Everyday Art World(2013).After brief introductions of each text, the speakers will embark on a conversation tackling issues such as the art world’s embeddedness in a networked, global system and shifting conceptions of the artistic medium, from specific materiality to technical support to platform.Questions they consider will include:*what specific forms of knowledge does art continue to offer as its historical definitions, categories, and criteria have transformed, and often, faded into obsolescence, much like the technologies it would critique?*To what extent should art and art discourse, as resources for getting our bearings in the present, mesh with and respond to technological change?*How are the interconnections between art and technology inevitable within networked life, part of the very structure of destablizing change;*and if they are inevitable, and if art and technology are not opposed but forced together in the medium of history, where does critique begin and what shapes should it take?

Wednesday, 19 August 2015

“CCA is pleased to present Out There, Thataway, a group
exhibition curated through dialogue between Francis Halsall, Declan Long, and
CCA that includes work by Stephen Brandes, Nathan Coley, Aleana Egan, Fergus
Feehily, Kevin Gaffney, Rana Hamadeh, and Merlin James.

Out There, Thataway has
two conceptual starting points: First, a concern with imagining or navigating
territories that are ‘beyond knowledge’;Second, an interest in ways that
metaphors of geography shape thinking and behaviour.The exhibition takes its
title from the last words spoken at the end of ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture’:
they are Kirk’s vague but determined directions as the Enterprise begins to
venture further out than ever before beyond known frontiers.

Out There, Thataway opens Saturday, August 8th at 7pm and
runs until 26th September 2015. The exhibition will be accompanied by
commissioned playlists and a public programme of events.

This exhibition is made possible through the generous
support of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Saturday, 1 August 2015

“The
strange, the surprising, is of course essential to art; but art has to create a
new world, and a new world must have a new structure.”

T.S.Eliot,
‘London Letter’, (Published in The Dial
Magazine, 1921)

Collaboration always comes with a threat.
But this risk is also the source of its richest reward. The threat we face when
we collaborate is the loss of identity.

By necessity any working relationship will
involve the emergence of a new creative agent that no-one will have full
control over. This is the collaboration itself; a system with its own volition,
direction and tastes. This system requires its partners to negotiate with it;
perhaps yield to it. It asks them to test their aesthetic decisions and justify
their choices. By necessity, collaboration forces new ways of thinking and
making. It pitches participants into a situation of creative antagonism in
which everyone cajoles each other into producing what nobody is quite
expecting.

Between 1921 and 1922 TS Eliot and Ezra
Pound worked together on the poem which would become the signal work of
modernist poetry. The Wasteland was produced by the creative antagonism of two
writers working together. Eliot acknowledged his debt by dedicating the poem
in 1925 to “Il miglior fabbro” (“the better craftsman”).

They show how the poem developed from a
negotiation between the multiple comments of Eliot and Pound (with additional
editorial comments from Valerie, Eliot’s wife and editor.) Under Pound’s guidance whole sections were
cut, moved around and re-sculpted. The title changes from “He Do the Police in
Different Voices.” The whole first page goes – cancelled by with a single
pencil line. Throughout we can see how the verses took shape by being
meticulously crafted into a self-contained world where everything works
together with elegant precision. What is left over from this conversation is a
poem in which it’s unclear as to who deleted or added what; and who should take
full authorial credit. We can’t be sure where one writer’s voice begins or
another ends. The manuscript can be seen variously through different perceptual
modes. Its a visual tabula rasa embedded with the multiple scrawled indices of
poetic creation and a collage overlaid with the scraps and fragments of reality
that have been pasted onto its surface. But it’s also a refrain of multiple
voices that sometimes negate each other and yet sometimes reverberate in a
brittle chorus. Much like the final poem itself there is a deep-seated ambiguity
of authorship and identity as multiple voices clamour to be heard. What have been
rendered uncertain are the relationships between the idioms of: high and
low-brow; classical and vernacular; modernity and tradition.

Something of the spirit of the authors’ relationship
is revealed in a note by Pound on a handwritten section which reads: “Bad- but
can’t attack until I get typescript.”

It
reveals an interlocutor who is eager to engage but also pass judgment and
“attack” the weakness of their friend. Pound slashes out Eliot’s use of the
word “perhaps” and writes “perhaps be damned” and “if you know, know damned
well or else you don’t.”

A lot of the text is dismissed as flabby or unnecessary with comments like:
“verse not interesting enough as verse to warrant so much of it.”

Pound both consoles and chastises Eliot with
the various “OKs” and “Echts” scrawled thorough the text. He takes him to task for
the “demotic” use of words like “abominable” and challenges him to resist
cliché and commonplace. “Too easy” Pound warns of a phrase too easily reached. Another is “too loose.” Laziness, it seems, is not to be tolerated. Pound takes Eliot to task for using
the word “may” with the scathing comment: “make up yr. mind” and is contemptuous of the equivocation suggested by the use of the word
perhaps: “perhaps be damned” he pithily notes. Elsewhere we can see that Eliot rewrites and rewrites until he gets the comment “OK”

The poem, clearly, would not be anything
like its published version without these conversations. In a different context
it would be easy to read such cajoling through the logic of power and
authority. Such language could be read as hurtful and unproductive; undermining
and antagonistic. However what we can see instead is them both using language
to build a new world around themselves which only they inhabit.

Much of the vocabulary is incomprehensible
to outsiders. For example one comment seems to be about the rhythm of a line: “3
lines Too tum-pum at a stretch” a further comment asks: “Why this Blot and Scutcheon between 1922 and
lil.’”

Another remark warns that the line “Filled all the desert with inviolable
voice” is “too penty” which is ambiguous and the contemporary reader can only hazard a guess as to
what it really means. Is it a recommendation to disrupt the pentamic beats of
repeated syllables perhaps? Or is this a warning that the “inviolable” voice
mimics the stridency of the Pentecostal imagery of renewal that Eliot used elsewhere
but is rejecting in The Wasteland. We can never be sure. This is the private
language of intimate communication. It talks of shared values and practices. It
is a new system of communication that is being brought into being through their
collaboration. This is the system of The Wasteland; a system that is also a
world unto itself.

[quotes from T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland, A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, Ed. Valerie Eliot, (London: Faber and Faber, 1971)]

Saturday, 28 February 2015

The
container ships that frequently dock in Dublin Port are representative of the
biggest moving objects that humans have ever produced. Yet despite the almost
sublime mass of these ships in general they are but tiny elements in much
bigger systems. They provide the necessary physical connections in the virtual
networks of global communication and control. Without these ships the world
system would stutter and atrophy. Without the objects they transport modern
environments and lifestyles would be untenable. As Rose George puts it “nearly
everything” comes to us by sea:

“Sometimes
on trains I play a numbers game. A woman listening to headphones: 8. A man reading
a book: 15. The child in the stroller: a least 4 including the stroller. The
game is to reckon how many of our clothes and possessions and food products
have been transported by ship. The beads around the woman’s neck; the man’s
i-phone and Japanese-made headphones. Her Sri Lanka-made skirt and blouse; his
printed in China book. I can always go wider, deeper and in any direction. The
fabric of the seats. The rolling stock. The fuel powering the train. The
conductor’s uniform; the coffee in my cup; the fruit in my bag. Definitely the
fruit, so frequently shipped in refrigerated containers that it has been given
its own temperature. Two degrees Celsius is ‘chill’ but 13 degrees is ‘banana.’” [Ninety Percent of Everything, (Picador, 2013)]

There are
two often repeated commonplaces about the conditions of contemporary
capitalism: its virtuality and its speed. This is understandable. In general
the move to a post-Fordist economy is explicable as the shift from
manufacturing to information; that is, from infrastructural to informational
systems. Now a lot of communication takes place in spaces that are
de-materialized; online. Interactions are often performed rapidly in which vast
global spaces are collapsed with either a swipe/click or another plane journey.
It’s easy, therefore, to assume that the two icons of the world system are the
tokens of this virtuality and speed: the screen and the jet-plane. Yet just
below the surfaces of the swiftly digitised world a lumbering mechanism of
docks, cranes, containers and vessels grinds and shudders.

The modern
container was invented in 1956 and adopted in the subsequent decade. It
standardised shipping according to a module that could be easily transferred
between ships, trains and trucks. Before then it didn’t make sense to
manufacture things in other places to avail of cheaper resources and labour.
Containers rendered everything transferable in a global system: raw-materials;
products; people. The container ship made capital truly migratory on a global
scale. But these massive ships are weighty, cumbersome and slow. The immediacy
and speed of day-to-day living is only guaranteed by the irresistible inertia
by which these ships move. The container ship is, in short, both the necessary
mechanism and emblem of post war capitalism.That
which lies manifest within their manifest is the very apparatus of our lives.

In that famous line from The Communist Manifesto

Marx
predicted that in the stage of capitalism brought about by the Industrial
Revolution all that is solid would melt into air. Relations that were concrete
and human, he feared, were being effaced by the immateriality of economic ones.
But, it transpired, all that is solid didn’t melt after all but was instead
broken down to its component parts, boxed up and shipped out in container
ships. These behemoths criss-cross the planet drawing their own occult patterns.
The intricate traces they leave in the foam of the sea only hint at the mostly
hidden migration of capital in the global system.

[This was the beginning of a longer response to Cliona Harmey's Dublin Ships project]

About

I'm an art writer and academic who lectures in the history/ theory of modern and contemporary art at National College of Art & Design, Dublin where I'm Director (with Declan Long) of MA Art in the Contemporary World.

I'm currently involved with several projects related to the theme of “Systems Aesthetics.”